ABSTRACT
‘Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva’ has had a significant place in my musings on Carpentier. My examination has shown that this text is imbued with evolutionary notions, assimilating, opposing and manipulating a wide range of theories proposed by anthropologists, palaeontologists, comparative musicologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts, among others, whilst also including a number of ideas that appear to be Carpentier’s original contributions. My study has also demonstrated how the main ideas of ‘Los orígenes de la música’ were fictionalized in Los pasos perdidos, uncovering the musicologist-composer protagonist as a mouthpiece for its author and offering further evidence for the well-established understanding that this work is heavily autobiographical. I have endeavoured to establish, as best as I could, an approximate date of writing (1944) and four possible audiences for which it may have been written: the Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club, the Sociedad Pro Arte Musical, the Conservatory Hubert de Blanck and the radio series ‘La Universidad del Aire’. It is hoped that other scholars will be able to narrow down these possibilities and develop further work on this text, following different lines of enquiry. These may include intertextual analyses focused on works by cited authors (Lydia Cabrera, Jules Combarieu, René Allendy, René Laforgue, Oswald Spengler and others) and on works by thinkers who are not quoted but nevertheless exerted a direct influence on Carpentier (for instance Fernando Ortiz). Other projects might be to examine ‘Los orígenes de la música’ alongside the drafts of Los pasos perdidos, La música en Cuba, El reino de este mundo (particularly how the author’s treatment of music reconstructs his notions about Latin American modernity and lo real maravilloso americano). Among the sources that remain largely unexplored by critics are Carpentier’s radio and film scripts of his own fictional works. These might be linked to some of the topics examined in this book, for instance the author’s fictionalization of theories on primeval music, and the impact of his broadcasting and music synchronization work upon his approaches to literary forms.
